Kocher's nailed it when he said what we are dealing with here are instances of psychopathology, something the ancient Greeks called nosos or nosemos -- spiritual disease -- which takes the form of "pathological derealization or militant dissociation from reality." Such folks have made their flight into "second reality," and they plan to stay there -- but they will continue to send all their bills to "first reality" for payment -- in direct money; and worse, indirectly, in the vast social consequences of the failure of millions of parents(s) to provide the physical and emotional security necessary for the proper moral development of children -- which poses huge future social costs, tangible and intangible.
I was particularly intrigued by Kocher's use of the word "derealization." One infers that he has in mind a standard of what is "real" for the human person, such that the failure to live to that standard results in a lapse of "human beingness" that is plainly culpable, existentially and socially. He is speaking the language of the "moral universe" here.
That language, however, has become more or less socially unacceptable in an age that has embraced the doctrine of moral relativity. In today's climate, making a moral judgment is widely regarded as offensive, insensitive, "judgmental." Certainly Phil Donahue, Oprah!, et al., seem to believe this. Then they trumpet their glamorous "wisdom" via the mass media to the ignorant "rabble," who take it as a further excuse to remain both ignorant and a rabble. Thus a vicious, pathological social phenomenon is constantly pampered and fed.
roughrider, you mentioned that Kocher is a Libertarian. Yet his critique does not strike me as Libertarian per se -- it is fundamentally classical and Judeo-Christian. That is to say, his moral critique is rooted ultimately in ideas of the "divine measure," the divine law; which is the will of God made manifest in the world of men and society and nature.
Moral relativism and atheism clearly are directly correlated complexes or syndromes: The former grows apace to the extent the latter does. Yet rootedness in the moral law is what makes the human person "real" in Kocher's sense. To be a "real" human person is to be a morally responsible person.
When one uses the word "responsible," one implies there is someone there to whom one is responsible. If I am the "end-all and be-all" of my existence, I am responsible to no one but myself. Which essentially is to say I am responsible to no one, for I have myself become "unreal" by virtue of my rejection of anything greater than my own appetites and preferences.
Thus, my rejection of the world as it actually is ("first reality") and my desire to live in an alternative reality that I find more congenial ("second reality") is finally a rejection of God and the ordered creation that He made according to His laws, physical and moral. Though the flight into second reality can take many forms, in this case, the form is a perennial Peter Pan-like existence in which "I never grow up" to be what I have it in me to be, let alone guide my children to grow up to be what they have it in them to be.
Taxpayers simply cannot afford to subsidize the pathology that Kocher describes. It doesn't matter how rich America is; there isn't enough money in the world to satisfy the unlimited cravings of unprincipled, irresponsible desire for benefits that have not been earned. To support this syndrome is to subsidize the destabilization of the social order in the long run. (Indeed, that may be the point of at least some such "experiments" in socialism.) In a social order that is fast unraveling, the first victims would be the people who clamor for the socialization of irresponsibility -- the would-be beneficiaries and their children, whose "champion" is Phil Donahue.... (But don’t worry about Phil: He’ll probably “be O.K.”)
Thank you for posting this marvelous essay, roughrider, and for bumping it along to me. Best, bb.